Thursday, 7 June 2012

TGIFF! - Playing With Leaves

Happy Friday/almost Friday wherever you are and welcome to TGIFF! I'm doing the happy dance again because I finally finished my 10BX Leaves wallhanging! Woo hoo!

This project began in a 10BX Fibre art class with Mary Pal at least three years ago. That was an awesome class where I learned so much. I remember saying, "it's like we're playing" as we went from one station to the next, experimenting with different surface design techniques. So much fun!

Not loving the border

Where I got stuck with finishing this at first was the machine quilting. I wanted to do free motion quilting on it and some of the leaves needed to be stitched down and given veins. I pulled it out again last year and added some borders and began some straight line quilting to stabilize it. But I hated the brown so shoved it back on the WIP pile.

Bye, bye brown!

This project is on my Finish-along list so when I was trying to figure out what to finish for this week's TGIFF!, this baby called my name. I couldn't live with those brown borders though and wouldn't unstitch the straight line quilting. Light bulb! I cut off the brown and replaced it using quilt as you go. Why didn't I think of that ages ago?

I added the front and the back with a slight larger than 1/4" seam allowance so the brown was completely covered by the seam.

New upper border section

Then I attached the batting for the new upper border section with a three stitch zig zag.

Three stitch zig zag to attach the new upper border
section batting to the older center section

Then I folded the new upper border section front and back upwards to cover the batting, pin basted it and quilted it. I did the same thing for the bottom.

Small stippling

The quilting is mostly small leaves with curlicues and small stippling in a green variegated thread by Aurifil that I had in my stash. Perfect!

I love your leaves!As I am learning more, buying more books, and seeing what others are making, I am so wanting to just sew and sew and sew. I am having a major problem finding time to fit everything in.I have let Friday slip by me for weeks on announcing my finishes, so my post is rather long today. I am proud of myself for not letting another Friday slip by me!

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